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Thrayn

Ive decided to have another go at designing the look of my geofiction world. Bear in mind that the shape of the world is based upon a huge destructive event that destroyed a supercontinent, pushing lands apart and swallowing some of it whole, so that fantasy element kind of changes the idea of tectonic plates. A massive maelstrom (real original, I know) is churning in the place of the destructive event, causing powerful circular winds to blow out counter-clockwise from the center, eroding land quickly in its path.

The idea behind the design of this world was to have it look natural yet flowy, using the coastlines, island chains, and major mountain ranges as focus lines for the eyes to follow, and I posted a picture of those lines that I had in mind. I do still want the world to appear realistic though, so as I haven't figured out the exact tectonic plates for it, let me know if it still looks believable and somewhat realistic.

Thanks! I'm not sure if I mentioned this (or if its obvious) but this is just a quick sketch of the shape of the world. I want to put a lot more detail into the coasts and mountains and everything, just wanted to make sure there was nothing wrong with the basic layout before committing to it.

I likey. The sworloning gives it a kind of, hrm, a partial Final Fantasy feel. Continents tapering into island chains everywhere. I guess you could say this style reminds me of Japanese tectonics writ large, not an Africa in sight. Need to come up with a typology of SF mapping...

Thanks for the comments Naeddyr, yeah I suppose youre right. It is kind of very Japanese land shaped taken onto a bigger scale, interesting.

Here is a small update, just a bit more defined coasts. Probably the shape of the coasts that will be depicted on the map of this large scale.
Next update I hope to have mountains and biomes laid out, and I will probably start on prettying it up.

Edit: Adding a swirly mark version aswell, just for fun. Interesting to see how the "flow" of the map changed when I was refining the coasts.

Interesting. The swirly version makes it appear elvish, a little Tolkien-ish.

What's the scale of your world? is it rather small, or rather earth-sized?

And am I wrong in assuming that this is actually a messed-up version of Earth? With a bit of imagination, I can make out NA, Europe, bits of Asia, a crunched Africa, a mostly disappeared South America and even Indonesia. Though Australia and the Antarctic would be missing...

I didn't intend at all for it to resemble our earth, but I see what you're seeing. The scale is supposed to be approximately the size of Afro-Eurasia, so it covers about half of the earth-sized planet. Although I haven't decided on an exact scale yet, it is supposed to be a map of the "world" (or the known world).

I cant believe I haven't posted here in almost 2 months! Progress on this map has been slow, and Ive been distracted with other things. Here is what I feel is getting close to the finished product for the coastlines, then I can finally get to more details! Any comments are appreciated.